Anybody know of any alternatives to receiving electronic payments (especially from eBay) besides PayPal?

PayPal's been screwing with me a lot, recently.

For starters, I never even knew I even had a PayPal Credit Account; I'd always paid for everything through my existing credit card, but I just saw this today - I have a balance of $2.99 for my PayPal Credit Account! I never even asked for a PayPal Credit Account! What the hell do I need another credit account for? I already have one through my bank!

I looked at the date for the transaction, and every transaction before it and after it had been charged correctly to my credit card, but this transaction, by its lonesome self, for some reason, had been charged to this PayPal Credit Account I didn't even know I had.

My best guess would be that at some point you accidentally clicked the "buy now and pay later" option?  I hate how Paypal tries to get me to do that with every transaction and I have to specifically pay attention to click the right thing NOT to do it.  Probably the best bet is to contact their customer service (assuming they have that?).  I see very little option for electronic payments outside of Paypal short of just using regular credit cards...

There really is no direct equivalent for online consumer <--> merchant transactions.  If you're doing consumer <--> consumer (like friend to friend), Venmo is popular but it's more of a "Everyone send Bob $40 and Bob will put this $600 dinner on his card" app.  Square makes pretty good merchant/vendor stuff if you're talking about face-to-face handoffs (like trade show vendors) but you do need to factor in the 2.5% overhead.

Also seconded that you probably forgot to hit the "No" button on their stupid window.  Is there any particular reason you want to use Paypal instead of a regular credit card?

Reasons I use PayPal to begin with?

WELL, PayPal certainly seems to be the only way to collect one's earnings from eBay, so there is that. And that's the part I'm concerned with the most: Receiving my earnings from eBay so I can actually use them someplace that isn't eBay.

For the most part, that's all I've had PayPal for up until this point, was to receive my earnings from eBay.

Only until recently, did I find out that I could actually spend my PayPal net income directly, by choosing to pay with PayPal (when buying from GoG.com, for example), as opposed to waiting for said money to transfer to my bank before I could actually spend it.

As far as using a credit card THROUGH PayPal, versus just using a credit card straight-up WITHOUT PayPal, I'd always been led to believe that PayPal provided an extra layer of security, preventing your credit card data from getting stolen.

Only reason I have my bank account linked to my PayPal is for that very reason of sending my eBay earnings from PayPal to my bank account. I never want to pay straight out of my bank account, if only for fear of the money being stolen just because I gave someone my bank account info that I shouldn't have.

Definitely going to be talking to PayPal's support tomorrow, if I can actually talk to a human being; tried it today, but it was automated, hopefully only because it's Sunday, and there's no human people to talk to only on the weekends.

I suppose it's reasonable if you still use eBay with any relative frequency, especially as a seller.  I can imagine the faces on people if you asked them for a money order, lol.  Some of my first eBay/STC transactions were via postal money order, ironically.

I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of the Paypal credit card, but from what I understood it's just a card that links to your current Paypal account balance, isn't it?  I don't think it links to your bank, although maybe if you overdraft what you have in your Paypal balance it will pull it from your linked bank account but I'm not sure.  I thought it was just a convenient way to spend money in your Paypal balance without having to transfer it to your bank account all the time.  I never really have that much of a balance in Paypal anyway which is why it was never something I explored.

paypal has a lot more seller protection that a regular merchant CC account, especially for protection of unauthorized charge disputes.

if you have paypal checkout on your website, customers also have the option of using a CC directly without having a PP account. with paypal website payment standard, though, they will be limited to a certain number of 'guest' checkouts' depending on their country. with WP-Pro, they can do as many as they want. however all the payment still arrive to you in your paypal account since paypal handles their processing (and it all counts towards your monthly sales volume for calculating your fee rate). the only difference is CC orders will have a receipt ID rather than a paypal transaction ID.